See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324088772 The Effect of Information Overload in Digital Media News Content Article · March 2017 CITATIONS READS 2 3,367 1 author: Renjith R. University of Kerala 6 PUBLICATIONS 2 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE All content following this page was uploaded by Renjith R. on 02 April 2018. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Communication and Media Studies ISSN 2395 -1559 Vol. 6 No. 1 | JAN-JUN 2017 pp: 73- 85 The Effect of Information Overload in Digital Media News Content RENJITH R.* ABSTRACT ost-modern society witnessed enormous changes in technology Pand innovations. As a result, the quick access to relevant information became a nightmare. The digital media contents became abundant and it turned impossible to retrieve useful information when needed. News media also faced such an information overflow. Accurate ‘news’ became hardly accessible. The internet world delivered manipulated and fake news, thus the integrity of the media is lost. The credibility of the digital media is questioned. This study tries to figure out causes of information overload and how it affected the digital media news content. A survey is conducted to know, how young generation is affected ‘Information overload’ and tries to find out how they cop-up with the problem. This study also tries to propose empirical answers for this mess. Technology itself has solutions for this problem. Proper use of technological inventions and tools will help us to cop up with ‘Information’ and ‘News’ overload. Keywords : Information Overload, Social Media, Mass Media, Digital Age, News Apps, Information Society Introduction he term ‘Information Overload’ became a cliché nowadays, but Tit is the major problem that modern society faces. It is ubiquitous and impossible to quantify its extent. The information available now is astonishing and is still continuously growing. An accurate statistics is unable to produce. This is an age of information explosion. The information database of the world is ever expanding. News media is also producing large amount of information every minute. Information *Renjith R. is a technocrat and a Research Scholar in Journalism at the Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Kerala, INDIA | e-mail : [email protected] 74 Communication and Media Studies Communication became more cluttered. A digital media user receives thousands of information bits every moment and his cognitive ability is unable to process this huge amount of data. News media organisations are passing through quick and inevitable changes. As in many areas of human life, news media also welcomed new technologies. A huge change is happened in no time, but soon countless problems elevated. The available information became abundant. News, a part of existing information too became excessive. During the past few years the growth of social media was quick. It helped to easily manipulate, duplicate and share information. All information including news content is manipulated and faked. Thus the problem became worst. Research Design & Methodology Data was collected through intensive literature survey, observation and interviews. Content analysis method is used to study the nature of news content in online media. Two online news portals (www.mathrubhumi.com & www.thehindu.com) have been chosen to study the nature of online news content for a period of one month. (November 5 to December 4 of 2015). To study how news is disseminating through social media the news content in facebook. com is observed for period of 30 days. (November 5 to December 4 of 2015). A survey was conducted among college students to study how Information Overload is affected their academic and cognitive aspirations. Simple random sampling technique is used to choose samples. A sample of 200 students of 18 to 25 age group was selected for this purpose. Both under graduate and post graduate students were included in the study. The scholar also interviewed 10 research scholars to confirm how intensively the information overload was affected our research field. Objectives The study had five major objectives. They were, 1. To understand, what really the Information Overload is, and how it affected ‘genuine information’ 2. To analyse the impact of Information Overload in digital media news content Communication and Media Studies 75 3. To ascertain as to how Information Overload has influenced our cognitive abilities 4. To examine as to how Information Overload affected academic arena 5. To suggest some pragmatic solutions for the problem of Information Overload What is Information Overload? Information Overload is a situation where the presence of too much information prohibits a person to find out required information and it causes difficulty in decision making. It is also calledinfobesity or infoxication. The information can be in the form of texts, images, sound, videos etc. The viral videos in YouTube, countless emails in our inbox, the endless stream of interesting articles on Facebook, innumerable tweets per second in Twitter are some examples of overloaded information. The huge amount of information causes our brain to function stressfully. This will affect our thinking pattern. Our decision making system will remain confused. It will stop us from making good decisions or interrupt from choosing a right option. We will end up by making wrong or delayed decisions. Information overload had been recognized and addressed as a problem long before in mid-nineteenth century. Scientists like J. Murray Luck, assistant professor of biochemistry at Stanford University, pointed out that they are failed to reassemble appropriate information for their research work. Later in a report of the U.S. President’s Scientific Advisory Committee’s in 1963, addressed the same problem. The phrase ‘Information overload’ is first mentioned in ‘The Managing of Organizations’, a book by Bertram Gross in 1964. But it was popularised by the futurologist Alvin Toffler in 1970, in his book ‘Future Shock’. He predicted that information abundance will cause big problems in near future. Information overload became a menace in academic and business sectors. When two or more type of information is available in the same subject or idea, there is a possibility of misperception. But here the available information is literally massive. Digital media provides thousands of web pages in fraction of a second in a single search. It becomes hardly possible to pick the required bit of information within the available time. Information becomes useless when it could not be accessed in right time. 76 Communication and Media Studies Digital Media Nowadays all the media devices became digital in a sense. But, in this study, online media and equipment including computers, smartphones, tablets, phablets, etc. are considered as digital media. World Wide Web became common for the last half a century. Advent of modern computers caused information to duplicate and spread faster. Social media became a ‘must’ in everybody’s life and allowed people to become news editors or manipulators. These duplicated information spread through World Wide Web. Many of the information are manipulated. People started to access news content through digital media, which mainly include online media. Thus digital media devices connected to the internet have a significant role in causing Information Overload. Information Overload in News Content News Overload is a part of information overload. The news content produced by media organisations and other sources becomes profuse. Different news organisations are treating same news event differently. As a result numerous versions of the same news would be produced. Nowadays internet, more specifically, social media is spreading the different versions of the news in no time. The audience has a profound role in disseminating these news items. They are choosing a version which is supporting their views and ideologies and sharing. The vested interest in a particular subject leads to misinterpretations. In fact, most of the time these manipulated information is sharing through the internet. Thus the real audience became confused. The vast amount of information prevent them from accessing the right information. News is also an information and it gets polluted by duplication and manipulation. By analysing and confirming all the information accessed from the net in the same topic, the right information could find. But the user will lose enormous time and productivity. Thus News Overload too causes problems in day-to-day life of the audience. Information Overload: Causes Nowadays devices having internet access, like computers, smartphones, tablets and many other digital devices are the major Communication and Media Studies 77 mediums to diffuse information. A wide variety of sources are there to run-off information. Social media and other online resources are the primary cause of information overload. The same news item is repeatedly distributing from different news sources. These information could be fake and authenticity is always dubious. The primary reasons of information overload are, 1. Widespread access to the Internet 2. Rapid rate of new information production 3. Social Media and Internet Sharing 4. Ease of information duplication and transmission 5. Increasing number of information channels of the same news content 6. Absence of tools to organise information 7. Lack of content filtering tools 8. Ignorance